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The code uses the “WebPage” schema and the item property “dateModified” to specify when the page was updated, it also use the HTML5 ‘time’ element and the “updated”, and “vcard” classes as well as of course the all important rel=”author”.

When To Use Author Footnotes

This author linking method is appropriate when:

you have more than one author on your site;

your WordPress theme does not provide rel=”author” links in the post byline;

your theme shows the publication date of the post rather than the last time it was updated – this makes your posts look dated

you do not want to show the last time the post was updated just beneath the heading of the post and prefer to have the date in the post footnote where it is less obtrusive

Personally I am using the Author Footnotes approach on my Thesis sites.

How To Change the Appearance of the FootNote

There are few ways to influence the footnote: three within the AuthorSure plugin and the fourth by adding your own CSS to your WordPress theme’s stylesheet, style.css .

Author Prefix

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose your own version of the text that precedes the author name in the footnoye – the “Last updated by”. For example, you might want to use “By” or of course something else if your site is not in English.

Date Prefix

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose your own version of the text that precedes the date in the footnote – the “at”. For example, you just want to use “on” or of course something else if your site is not in English.

Show Updated Date

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose not to show any date at all in the footnote: it just contains the link to the author.

Customize Footnote Appearance

The plugin specifies the CSS classes authorsure-footnote and authorsure-author-link which you can add as elements to your theme style.css file. This allows you to make sure that these style elements are controlled by your theme.

So for example if your theme always has footnotes in small capitals, and links in blue then you would add the following lines to style.css.

Your 6 Step Checklist

On your WordPress site go to "Your Profile" page and enter the URL of your Google+ Profile in the box next to the Google+ icon

On Google+ click on your Profile icon on the left, and then on the About menu item. Scroll down the About page until you see the Links section then edit that, and add a link in the contributor section to your Author page on your WordPress site - your author page URL will be something like http://www.site.com/author/user

Verify a few of your posts on the WordPress site by pasting their URLs into the Structured Data Testing Tool. If the tool says each page is verified then your pages are eligible for display of author information in the SERPs